Friends
by The Psychotic House-Elf
Summary: Instead of making new friends on the Hogwarts Express in 1995, Luna loses the only one she has. In the lonely year that follows, she discovers just how well the name 'Loony Lovegood' fits her. Insane!Luna. Very dark.
1. September I

**_s_**_e nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357..._

**A**uthor's notes:** T**his story is going to get very, _very_ dark. I'll let your imaginations come up with the warnings. All the chapters were written beforehand.

* * *

**FRIENDS**

**September (Part I)**

* * *

In a compartment on the Hogwarts Express, which is still at King's Cross Station, Luna Lovegood has decided that she's going to pass her time by doing crossword puzzles in her father's magazine. She really wants to learn the spell to turn peoples' ears into kumquats, so she can use it on Allison Anders, who's a bully of the worst kind.

Later, Luna plans to do arts and crafts, if she has time. She's already been making small paper chains that consist of the letters _F-R-I-E-N-D-S_ strung together with string. When she was in Diagon Alley, she bought some shiny gold paper which is now sitting in her trunk, ready to be used to for her _FRIENDS_ paper chains. Luna is going to use them for decorations, because they're very pretty. The word _FRIENDS_ is a very nice word, she thinks as she fills in another series of boxes on her crossword puzzle. It's her favorite word in the whole world.

Luna likes having friends. She has a friend, actually. She has one friend. Her friend's name is Ginevra Weasley. Ginevra likes to be called Ginny, but Luna always calls her Ginevra anyway. It's a nice name, Ginevra. Ginevra is nice to Luna, too, and always calls her Luna instead of _Loony_. She says she'll _always_ call her Luna, and that makes Luna feel very warm inside.

The compartment door opens. Luna doesn't pay it much mind, as she's too absorbed in her crossword puzzle to look up. Unfortunately, her visitor turns out to be someone not so nice.

"'Lo there, L_oo_na," says Anders as she slides into Luna's compartment. At first glance, Anders might strike just about anyone as the kind of person who'd hide in the back of a crowd and try not to be noticed: she's a small girl with short, dark hair, and blue eyes that peer through a pair of enormous glasses. "Can I read your daddy's magazine?"

"I'd rather you didn't," Luna replies. "I've discovered that my possessions tend to wind up badly damaged when I give them to you."

"'_How Far Will Fudge Go To Gain Gringotts_?'" Anders reads. She's turned her head sideways to see the article titles on the upside-down cover. "'_Sirius – Black As He's Painted_?' That sounds _fascinating_, L_oo_na. Listen, you wouldn't mind if I brought some people in here, would you? Good. Because I already invited Rebecca Tanneth, and Ginny Weasley, and some other people I met in the hallway that I don't really know at all."

She grins toothily.

"Oh," says Luna. At least Ginevra is coming.

A round-faced boy with a toad pokes his head in, and Anders greets him very loudly. He looks mortified and ducks out as fast as he can; Anders snickers, as does her friend Rebecca, who comes in seconds later. Rebecca looks to be considerably more of a socialite than Anders, with blond glamours on her hair and a great deal of makeup on her face. Anders quickly scoots over to let her sit down.

"What's the Black one about?" asks Anders, tilting her head again to read the cover of the _Quibbler_. "I mean, it was really scary, having him lurking around the grounds back in our second year. I saw a Mind Healer afterward, and he said it's traumatized me severely. I guess now I just have to know all I can about him so I can move on."

"Anders..." Rebecca makes an odd sound, like she's choked on something.

"What's your dad think about Black?" Anders inquires, sounding very intrigued. "I mean, he wrote the article, didn't he?"

"No... No, it was a write-in... The article says Sirius Black is – Sirius Black is a false name," Luna explains hesitantly, twisting a lock of her hair around her finger and looking past her magazine at the space between Anders and Rebecca as she speaks. "He's actually – S-Stubby Boardman..."

"From – From The Hobgoblins?" Rebecca says in a strangled voice. "_That _Stubby Boardman?"

Anders' eyes have widened considerably. "My god," she declares. "I'll never be able to look at that poster of him the same way again." Then her eyes widen even more. "_Wait_, L_oo_na, does this mean that... Sirius Black is _innocent_?" she exclaims with a gasp, clapping her hands against her cheeks in an exaggerated, theatrical manner.

"That's w-what it s-says in the – in the – the article," mumbles Luna, her voice cracking a little when Rebecca puts her face in her hands and begins shaking.

"She's just upset," says Anders, throwing Rebecca a sympathetic look. "She has a huge crush on Stubby Boardman."

"I do not, _Anders!"_ Rebecca shoots back, sounding deeply offended. _"You're_ the one who has a huge poster of him hanging over your bed."

"Where the hell are Cormac and Kevin?" Anders suddenly changes the topic, looking quite annoyed indeed. "They said they'd come sit with us!" She throws her hands up in another theatrical gesture.

"Yes, Anders, I know. I was there."

"Well, where are they?"

Rebecca scoffs. "As if they'd want to sit anywhere near Loony Lovegood."

"Kevin thinks she's really funny," the other girl huffs. "Please, can we go find them and make them come?"

"Why are you so set on having them here? Are you going to flash them or something? You haven't got nearly enough cleavage for anyone to care."

A dull flush crosses Anders's face. "No!"

_"Fine_, Anders," Rebecca suddenly snaps, exasperated. "Loony, make sure nobody takes our seats, got it?"

Luna breathes a silent sigh of relief as the two girls get up and leave, and goes back to her crossword puzzle. She really hopes Ginevra gets here and sits down next to her before Anders and Rebecca come back with their friends. Luna really wants to see her friend before she goes and sits with all the people that don't really get along with her (she wishes they did, but her mother once told her that you can't have _everybody_ like you, just some people). She and Ginevra haven't seen each other for almost a week, and that's a _very_ long time for friends not to see each other.

So, even though Luna would really like to leave and not have to sit with Anders and Rebecca and their friends, Luna knows Ginevra is coming here, so she can't leave or else Ginevra won't be able to sit with her, and that would be very bad of her because she's Ginevra's friend and friends are supposed to stick together.

Ginevra probably misses her a lot, too.

Voices drift in through the door Anders hasn't bothered to close after a while:

"Hi, Harry... Hi Ginny... Everywhere's full... I can't find a seat..."

"What are you talking about?"

Luna almost sighs with relief again when she hears Ginevra's voice. Ginevra comes into view, and peers into the compartment very briefly, an even briefer smile crossing her face when she sees Luna. Luna herself breaks out into the biggest smile she's smiled in almost a week, which she hides behind her _Quibbler_ magazine because everyone says her smiles are creepy and she doesn't want to scare Ginevra away.

Then she hears:

"There's room in this one, there's only Loony Lovegood in here –"

and she stiffens a little, momentarily forgetting where she is and what's going on around her after that.

There's more talking, but Luna doesn't really take any of it in. Her brain seems to have ground to a halt, completely gummed up by the six words she's trying to process: '_There's only Loony Lovegood in here..._'

Ginevra has never called her that before. Ginevra said she would never call her that.

Why did she call her _Loony Lovegood_? She said she would never...

Luna actually feels ill. Ginevra is the only person she knows who doesn't call her that horrible name – or knew, at least, until now. It's burning something painful into her chest and up her throat, making her lip tremble, and making her eyes wet...

"What's the matter, Luna?" Ginevra asks. She's standing in the doorway with her trunk, Harry Potter, and the boy with the toad, looking concerned.

"You called me _Loony_," says Luna quietly.

An expression of realization spreads quickly across Ginevra's face. "I didn't mean it like – Luna, listen, I'm not making fun of you –"

"But you promised," Luna mumbles. "You made a friend promise..."

Ginevra opens and closes her mouth a couple of times. "Luna, I didn't _mean_ it that way, I was only joking!"

"You promised."

"Er... Am I missing somethi–" Harry Potter begins, but Anders's voice interrupts him.

"Hey! We were there first! You dicks get out of there."

She and Rebecca have returned empty-handed. Rebecca looks delighted at the scene unfolding before them, and Anders herself displays a conflicting mixture of dejection and dark amusement. When Ginevra sees them, her upset turns to annoyance.

"Luna, do you want to come sit with us somewhere el–"

"No, thank you, Ginevra," Luna chokes. "I'll stay here."

"Get out of here!" Rebecca commands Ginevra. She's barely containing her glee. "You've already made her cry, Weasley. Why don't you go be a cunt somewhere else?"

Harry Potter, who looks very angry at Rebecca's very unkind words, orders Rebecca to apologize for saying those things to his friend (Luna thinks Ginevra is lucky to have friends who'll defend her like that). When Rebecca lazily says she hasn't done anything wrong, he moves to do something, maybe to defend Ginevra's honour by hexing the offending party, but Ginevra stops him and tells him it's not worth it. Then she corrects herself and says Rebecca isn't worth it. She says they just like to make people angry for no reason.

Anders, who until now hasn't said anything nasty for the entire fifteen or twenty seconds she's been there, lights up like a Christmas tree and says, "Yes, Potter, kind of like your girlfriend. Your girlfriend just ripped L_oo_na's world apart for no reason. Now, go away." She and Rebecca make a point of snickering loudly at the redhead as they slide into the compartment.

"Er... Can we do that, Harry?" the boy with the toad suggests awkwardly, and he tugs on Harry Potter's arm. "I don't want to get in a fight with anybody..." To his obvious relief, Harry Potter nods, though he's glowering at Anders now.

Ginevra also aims a glare at Anders before leaving. "God, you're a bitch," she says, and disappears.

Anders blows up upon hearing this and follows Ginevra back out into the hall, screaming: "Hey, Weasley – when you sucked that diary guy's dick, did ink come out?"

In the ensuing argument, Rebecca also leaves, and Luna is completely forgotten. She stays in her seat in the compartment, hugging her _Quibbler_ magazine to her chest and crying softly. Her crossword puzzle goes unfinished; instead, she just stares blankly out the window for the rest of the train ride. It's like watching a funeral procession, she thinks as it grows dark and the landscape's features become indistinct, ominous dark shapes, blurred slightly by her tears.

One is expected to mourn the lost at funerals, so Luna mourns the loss of her first and only friend.

* * *

**I** would like to know what you think of Luna, her idea of friendship, the way Ginny treats her, the way Anders treats her, the way Rebecca treats her (she's different from Anders, isn't she), her reaction to Ginny's comment, and so on. I put a lot of work into this story, and I want to know how you felt when reading it. Ginny is a little OOC, but she's a normal teenager here, not a perfect virgin princess who exists solely for Harry to save her.

**A**s always, my beta-reader is the great and awesome TuesdayNovember.


	2. September II

**_s_**_e nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357..._

**C**hapter two is significantly shorter than chapter one, but don't worry - they'll get lengthier again as time progresses.

* * *

**FRIENDS**

**September (part II)**

* * *

"Miss Lovegood, please keep up with the rest of the class. You haven't even opened your book."

Luna looks down at her Transfiguration textbook.

"Oh," she says weakly, and opens it so she can stare vacantly at the first page it falls to, not actually taking in any of the words.

It's already three weeks into term and Luna still hasn't got over what Ginevra said to her. The words won't leave her alone; they've been banging on the inside of her head almost constantly, day and night, no matter what she does.

_There's only Loony Lovegood in here_...  
_There's only Loony Lovegood in here_...  
_There's only Loony Lovegood in here_...

Bang, bang, bang. Rattle, rattle, rattle.

There's only _there's only Loony Lovegood in here..._ here in Loony Lovegood...

The cleverness of this wordplay is enough to distract Luna from her troubles for a few seconds, before she realizes she just called herself _Loony Lovegood_. No. That shouldn't happen. Her name is Luna. Not _Loony_. Her name will never be _Loony_.

No matter how much they call her _Loony_, it will never be _Loony_. It will always be Luna because that's what her mummy named her.

Her mummy loved her very much and didn't call her _Loony_.

Like Ginevra did on the train.

_There's only Loony Lovegood in here_...  
_There's only Loony Lovegood in here_...  
_There's only Loony Lovegood in here_...

_Luna_ has no friends now. Normally, she'd just trudge on through it, if it were anybody else calling her _Loony_. But it was Ginevra, which means she has no friends anymore, and having no friends means she has no one to look at and smile at and talk to about the things that are on her mind. Like she sees everyone around her doing. Luna wants to be able to do that again.

But she can't, and she truly doesn't understand why. Is she doing something wrong? Is there something wrong with _her?_ None of her attempts to make friends with anyone else at Hogwarts besides Ginevra have ever worked. She's tried doing everything everyone else does, but none of it gets her anywhere except stuck to the ceiling or locked in broom cupboards.

All Luna wants is to have friends. She loves having friends.

No... She _would_ love having friends. Luna has only ever had _a_ friend, and she managed to lose that one (she's still not sure why Ginevra said that about her. Not knowing why she did it is hurting almost as badly as the fact that she did it).

During the summer, Ginevra said she would introduce Luna to some of _her_ friends (Ginevra is very likeable and has a lot of friends) when they came back to Hogwarts... That's what she said. Luna was so happy when she got that particular letter that she almost ran to the Burrow to hug her. But she didn't, of course, because Ginevra might not take very well to that... And now she's lost Ginevra as a friend.

Luna has no friends. That thought keeps coming back to her, no matter how hard she tries to just go on as if the world were still turning the way it should be.

Even Anders has friends, and Anders is one of the most unlikable people Luna has ever met. Luna tries to think that she, too, is likeable, but nobody else seems to agree. They call her strange, and odd, and _Loony_. And no one ever defends her when they do it, because no one is her friend. Because she has no friends.

If Luna had friends, she would _always_ defend them if anyone ever did anything to them. She would do anything for them. Really, she would! She would do _anything_... Friendship is more important than anything else in the world, after all.

All Luna does during the summer is sit on her bed and imagine what she'd be doing if she had friends. And walk around in the forest and daydream about the exciting adventures she would go on if she had friends. And sit up on her rooftop in the evenings and watch beautiful sunsets all by herself because she has no friends to share them with.

And make paper chains that say _FRIENDS _on them.

In her Transfiguration textbook, she writes the word _Friends_ over and over, because Friends is such a wonderful, wonderful word. She even has a special pen that she uses for it instead of a quill. It's got very pretty gold ink. Luna writes _Friends_ a thousand times, because she wishes she had a thousand friends.

But she doesn't even have one.

By the time she's wandering down the hall, trying to remember what her next class is – because Anders stole her schedule – several pages of Luna's Transfiguration textbook are completely unreadable, the black letters and illustrations obscured by the word she's written over and over, more times than she can count, in shining gold ink: _Friends_... _Friends... Friends..._

She spends History of Magic drawing an excruciatingly detailed likeness of Ginevra, her only friend, ever, instead of taking notes like she ought to be. That night, she makes the mistake of leaving it out on top of her trunk, where other people can get to it, for a moment, unguarded, and it's a pile of ash by the time she returns from brushing her teeth.

Although Luna is very used to having her belongings destroyed (the only things of hers that have survived since her first year are her wand and Butterbeer cork necklace, as she's kept them either on her or in her trunk all the time), finding her drawing of Ginevra reduced to cinders hits her almost as hard as hearing Ginevra say _There's only Loony Lovegood in here_... and so after staring at the mess in silence while Anders laughs at her for a while, she pulls the hangings on her bed shut and cries for the second time that month.

The next day, Luna excuses herself from Charms class and goes into the girls' bathroom so she can cry again, because she's been staring at Ginevra's flaming red hair on the other side of the room and writing _Friends... Friends... Friends_... in her textbook for almost an hour.

And she does it again a few days later, in the evening, right after dinner, because she just feels so lonely eating by herself at the end of the Ravenclaw table.

All Luna wants is one friend.

Just one. That's all.

That's not asking too much... is it?

Friends.._. Friends... Friends... Friends... Friends... Friends... _

(...Is it?)

* * *

**I**f anybody wants a good soundtrack for the rest of the story, look up Shining's _V: Halmstad_ album. Or pretty much any Shining album, for that matter. Personally, I prefer _II: Livets Ändhållplats_ for this fic, but _Halmstad_ is probably more accessible/more listenable to people who aren't used to Shining and associated acts.

_**A**s always, TuesdayNovember beta-read this chapter._


	3. October

_**s**e nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357..._

**S**orry this is a day late. Real life got in the way. Enjoy.

* * *

**FRIENDS**

**October**

* * *

Last year, Ginevra was very nice and always took the seat next to Luna when they had classes together, so the Wrackspurt-infested bullies wouldn't be able to sit next to her and harass her by calling her names like _Loony Lovegood_. But now, Ginevra sits with a fellow Gryffindor girl whose name Luna doesn't remember. Whoever she is, she certainly has a lot more friends than Luna, who has no friends.

Now Luna spends the beginning of each class playing musical chairs to get away from people like Anders (particularly Anders). She almost always ends up sitting alone in the back of the room. Sometimes, when Anders has to sit with someone she doesn't like, she waits for Luna to excuse herself to cry in the bathroom and then switches their things so that when Luna comes back, she has to sit next to whoever Anders was sitting with before and Anders gets to sit by herself. There are a few times when Luna simply leaves and doesn't come back at all; she doesn't feel any real motivation to return to the classrooms for some of her classes, with what's waiting for her there.

In the beginning, before casting a Silencing Charm becomes automatic for her upon entering a stall to cry, students sometimes come in and hear Luna crying, and they ask if she's all right, and she says that no, she's not all right, because she hopes that maybe they'll talk to her and they can be friends, and they're sympathetic and offer to help her, but then when they finally recognize her voice as belonging to _Loony Lovegood_, they stop caring and leave her to cry by herself, sometimes laughing a little at her first.

Luna has never cried this much before in her life, not even when her mummy died. Were she a different kind of person (the kind who judges others) she might compare herself to a soppy, over-emotional girl like Rebecca – crying every other day in the middle of the common room over a lost boyfriend, or because her favourite singer got engaged – but this doesn't feel like it's the same thing at all. Luna feels like crying _all the time_ lately; it's just that most of the time, she's able to stop herself. Increasingly, though, little things that shouldn't affect her are shattering her self-control for twenty or thirty painful minutes at a time.

If she were to draw a picture of herself (like she did with Ginevra, who used to be her friend), she imagines would probably draw a big black cloud raining on her head, because that's how she feels nowadays.

In order to distract herself from the way everything seems to be so very bleak and cold and blue and unhappy, Luna starts up her arts and crafts hobby again. In the evenings, she sits on her bed and makes her paper chains that say _FRIENDS_ on them. While she does this, Luna can think about what she'd do if she had a thousand friends instead of how she doesn't actually have any real friends, and the miserable, oppressive feeling inside her goes away for a little while.

Anders thinks it's hilarious, and sets the _FRIENDS_ paper chains on fire whenever Luna isn't around to protect them. Luna just makes more. And more. And more. Some of the tension goes away each time she finishes one. But she still cries just as much as she did before.

If Luna had a friend who would hold her when she cries, she would never ask for anything else, ever. Having a friend would make everything feel so much more _right_ again, like it was before everything fell apart on the first of September, and then Luna wouldn't have to get so upset over little things that shouldn't upset her and end up crying even more after she finishes crying because she has to sit by herself and think about how she doesn't know what to do or how to fix what's wrong with her life or why people don't like her or why Ginevra called her _Loony Lovegood_ on the Hogwarts Express or why she _can't stop crying_.

It becomes a struggle to keep up with her homework while crying in bathrooms all day and making her _FRIENDS_ paper chains all evening and not actually learning anything in class because she's busy writing _Friends_ in her textbooks with her pretty gold pen. Most of Luna's homework is burned by Anders before it ever reaches the classroom anyway, and this year Luna just can't find the energy to do it over again each time. Luna, who has always been a diligent and dedicated student, suddenly has nothing to turn in most of the time, in any of her classes.

As for the classes themselves, they're quickly becoming terrifying instead of fun and educational. Luna used to pretend she was speaking to Ginevra whenever she answered a question in class so the laughter and whispered jokes about her off-key voice and strange way of speaking wouldn't bother her. But now she's speaking to a professor and a classroom full of people who are all laughing at her, so she suddenly feels very small and very vulnerable whenever she's called on to speak, and her voice is always reduced to an inaudible mumble after only a few words.

The pink toad lady who took over the Defense Against the Dark Arts position calls on Luna to answer questions a lot.

Even though Luna never raises her hand.

She starts following Ginevra around between classes. At a distance, of course, because it's too painful to even think of talking to her; there's no telling what she might say if Luna actually tried to make conversation with her. She's not sure why she's following her, beyond simply feeling a driving _need_ to be near her – near the only friend she's ever had.

At first, Ginevra doesn't notice, and then she pretends not to have noticed, but then she starts acting rather frightened, and suddenly her twin brothers are accompanying her everywhere. Still, Luna feels like she has to follow her whenever she can. She has to be near her. They were friends once, and that's more than what Luna has with anyone else right now.

She needs the familiarity of Ginevra Weasley, even if they're not talking or even interacting at all.

Once, Luna follows Ginevra to the Hog's Head Inn during their Hogsmeade weekend. There's a meeting going on there. Harry Potter has called it. Luna thinks Harry Potter is kind of nice; he's never called her _Loony_ before, and that's almost like having a friend as well. But not quite, so it doesn't offer much solace when she cries in bathrooms and walks around with a huge cloud raining on her. She's feeling unusually brave today, for some reason – maybe because she's avoided enough people to only have been called _Loony Lovegood_ twice so far _(all day!)_ – so she drifts into the tavern and sits down with everyone else. In the very back, of course, where she won't be noticed. That's very important.

The old Luna, the one who didn't mind what people thought of her, is long gone. The new one feels like everybody's always watching her and whispering about her. Every laugh is aimed at her. Every glance that happens to catch her eyes makes her look quickly down at her bare feet. Just being in the presence of so many people generates an almost unbearable tension within her.

Hermione Granger and Harry Potter talk about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named for a while. Luna zones out, feeling less and less human and more and more like an alien here, as people talk and she has things to say but can't figure out how to insert them into the conversation without interrupting anyone. It's like being on the outside of a snow globe and having to look in at everyone inside celebrating Christmas together.

_(You can look, Loony, but you can't touch!)_

The Hat put Luna in Ravenclaw for a reason, despite her inability to solve the riddle of friendship. She's reasonably intelligent. She knows what's going to happen when she eventually, inevitably, becomes the center of attention in this meeting, even if it's only meant to be for two seconds - something like:

_Student: "What's Loony Lovegood doing in here with the normal people?"_

_Ginevra: (sighing) "She must have followed me in..."_

_Everyone: "Get out, Loony! Nobody wants you here!"_

So before they can hurt her like that, Luna quietly gets up and makes her way out of the Hog's Head. She walks back to Hogwarts with her _Quibbler_ magazine held up awkwardly in front of her face – ostensibly because she's reading it, but really because she's using it to hide the fact that she's crying and doesn't want anyone to know. Luna is awake until almost three in the morning that night, making _FRIENDS_ paper chains. She wonders if anyone would have talked to her nicely and been her friend if she'd stayed in the Hog's Head. Maybe. There might have been very, very, very, very slim chance of it happening, maybe, perhaps.

But if someone did talk nicely to her, Luna wonders, what would she do? She has so very many _important_ things to say, but doesn't know how to communicate them in conversation short of awkwardly blurting them out as she thinks them, which many people seem to find rude. So all she's ever managed to talk about with anyone besides Ginevra is... nothing. If Luna had friends, friends she could just blurt out her thoughts to without worrying about them being angry with her for it, she would talk about _lots_ and _lots _of things with them. She would tell them about herself, and about her father, and about her mother, and about things that matter and are far more private to her than Crumple-Horned Snorkacks and Wrackspurts. If she had friends, that's what she would do.

But the only friend Luna ever had was Ginevra, who is no longer her friend. Which, of course, is why she follows Ginevra everywhere and needs to be near her. It's a little bit like having a friend again, you see.

But only a little bit.

* * *

**M**any thanks to my beta, TuesdayNovember, who cleaned up a lot of errors and made this infinitely more awesome.**  
**


	4. November

_**s**e nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357..._

**F**rom this point on, the 'very dark' warning is going to become exponentially more applicable.

* * *

**FRIENDS**

**November**

* * *

November finds Luna walking around barefoot in the stone hallways, because one of the upperclassmen stole her shoes and threw them in the lake, and the Giant Squid ate them.

Some of the other Ravenclaws have begun harassing her for her excessive loss of house points, both in class and out. They want to stop her costing them their chance at the house cup, because it's partly (mostly, they say) her fault they're in third place, after Gryffindor and Slytherin. If she didn't keep losing house points, they might be in first place right now! So they start locking her out of the common room to punish her when she loses points. Luna has to wait outside, usually in the cold, for someone to take pity on her and let her in, because one of the Prefects set the raven knocker to give her riddles that are impossible to solve. Her housemates say they won't fix it until she stops losing them house points all the time.

Luna keeps losing house points because she never has her homework, or wears shoes, or answers questions, or even comes to class half the time, or is in the right place at the right time. She never has her homework because Anders burns most of it, and she doesn't do the rest because she's too busy making paper chains that say _FRIENDS__,_ because it makes her feel better when she does that. She never wears shoes because one of the upperclassmen stole them while she was sleeping and threw them in the lake, and the giant squid ate them.

She never answers questions when she's called on, because when she talks the other students all stare at her and it makes her uncomfortable and she stammers and the teachers can't understand her and take points anyway, and besides she doesn't come to class half the time because either Anders has stuck her to something in the common room for the day, or her things are stuck inside in her trunk and she's trapped outside of the common room, barred from entering by the raven knocker, which asks her things that make no sense, or else she's just too scared to come to class since she has no friends at all and is hiding in one of the bathrooms instead. Last year, Luna really liked her classes, but now she doesn't like her classes very much, so she hides and waits for that section of her schedule to end, and when she does that, she doesn't have to be called on and get stared at and explain that she doesn't have her homework and lose points and get hexed under the desk by Anders.

And she's just never in the right place at the right time. Ever.

After a few Defense Against the Dark Arts lessons, the pink toad lady decides she doesn't really like Luna's habit of showing up barefoot, late, and homework-less (or not showing up at all). Then she decides she just doesn't like Luna, period, and starts taking points from her in class for whatever reasons she can come up with. When Luna finally, bravely (not that bravely, really, because she's only speaking up so her housemates will stop destroying her possessions) objects to this, the pink toad lady delights in spending half a lesson ridiculing her, her father's magazine, her awkwardness, and her alienation, making her more and more upset until she cries in front of the whole class, for the very first time.

Ginevra seems appalled by the pink toad lady's antics. There's a little window of time, maybe a few hours, when Luna hopes that, maybe, Ginevra will come up to her in the hall and hug her and say she's sorry for calling her _Loony _and say it was a mistake and she's very sorry and will never do it again as long as they both shall live, and then they'll be friends forever and the pink toad lady will never be able to hurt Luna like that ever again because Luna will have a friend again and no one can hurt her when she has a friend.

But none of that happens. Ginevra doesn't say a word to Luna after class, or at lunch, or later on, when they pass each other in the hall, or even when Luna follows her more closely than usual. In fact, Ginevra doesn't even acknowledge Luna's existence after that one disgusted look at the pink toad lady in class.

Just like before.

During dinner that night, the pink toad lady comes and tells Luna (with a smile) that she has a detention for being oppositional toward authority figures. Luna has never had detention in her life. She suddenly feels as if she's gone very bad and rotten and will never get anywhere in her life because she never does her homework and doesn't do anything in class and the teachers have started hating her and now she's got detention for the first time... and this makes her upset enough that she has to excuse herself (not that there's anyone to excuse herself to, as no one sits with her at the end of the table) and go find a bathroom to cry in so she won't humiliate herself again.

The next day, Luna spends several hours sitting outside the pink toad lady's office, watching people go in and out, because she feels so sick to her stomach that she doesn't really see any point going to dinner anyway, and she just wants to get her horrible detention over with and get on with her life and try to forget how very bad and rotten she's become. Two other people she doesn't know go in and out of the office while she waits. They go in nervous, and come out grimacing. One of the students (whom she has never spoken to in her life) calls her _Loony Lovegood_. She cries again.

An hour later, the pink toad lady is there, smiling at her with needle-like teeth, and Luna almost throws up with anxiety. She gets shakily to her feet and follows the pink toad lady into her office, wiping the tears off her face, only to have them replaced with new ones.

No, she's really not very brave at all, is she...

But friends (like Ginevra) could be very brave, she thinks. If Luna had a friend (like Ginevra), she wouldn't have to feel so bad and rotten, and she wouldn't have to feel like she's going to be ill, and she wouldn't have to cry all the time. Nobody could _ever_ hurt her! Of course, Luna reminds herself as she stares at the red-feathered quill in front of her (it's very pretty...and very sharp...), she doesn't have any friends who would be strong for her when she needs someone. Because she doesn't have any friends at all.

So, when she stumbles out the door of the Defense classroom an hour later, crying harder than ever, there's nobody there to hold onto; Luna is as alone as she was when she shuffled in. Her right hand hurts terribly, in the spot where she's been carving the words _My name is Loony Lovegood_ into her skin all night with the red-feathered, and red-inked, quill as her punishment for being oppositional toward authority figures. Luna doesn't sleep at all when she returns to Ravenclaw Tower; instead, she sits on her bed and makes _FRIENDS_ paper chains all night while trying not to look at the back of her hand.

The next morning, the pink toad lady gives her another detention in the Great Hall for not wearing shoes. And another the day after for not having her homework in a class she hasn't had yet. And the next day for wearing the same clothes four days in a row and looking like she hasn't slept in the same amount of time, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day... At first, Luna pleads desperately with the pink toad lady that she's _not_ bad and rotten, she really isn't, and she's _not_ _Loony Lovegood_, because her mother wouldn't name her something so horrible. But nothing she says works. The pink toad lady tells her to do as she's told and write her lines again, or everything will get worse for her – and Luna doesn't want to get any worse than she already is, so she does as she's told and writes the awful words out again and again while tears roll down her cheeks.

_My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood._

"In case you ever forget," the pink toad lady explains in a sickeningly sweet voice when Luna finally asks her why she has to cut this particular phrase into her hand over and over.

_My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood._

When she finishes all of her detentions – that is, when she finally reaches a point where she doesn't have any more – Luna sits down in the hall right outside the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom and cries with sheer relief. And then one of the Prefects – the blonde fifth year Slytherin boy – is there, asking her what she's doing out so late, sitting in the hallway, and he's calling her _Loony Lovegood_, and she can't answer because he's upsetting her too much because she _hates_ being called that name, because it _hurts_, and he finally drags her to her feet and back into the Defense classroom, toward the pink toad lady's office.

"I found her lounging in the hallway," he explains to the pink toad lady.

"Did you, now?" says the pink toad lady. She looks at Luna with a horrible, horrible expression of satisfaction. Her teeth are showing again; they do look so much like sharp, bony needles. "You clearly haven't learned to obey the rules. I think another detention is in order..."

Luna opens her mouth to protest.

Then she shuts it again. She nods stupidly, vacantly, and allows herself to be led back to Ravenclaw Tower.

When she shows up for her next detention, Luna doesn't come in crying. Instead, she wears a big, fake, plastic smile plastered across her face. She wears this smile to every one of her classes that day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day. And she wears it when the pink toad lady gives her more detentions for arbitrary things like having greasy hair and looking like she's making faces because her eyes are too big and wide, and when Ginevra continues ignoring her because _I don't know why! What am I doing wrong?_, and when people who aren't Ginevra call her _Loony Lovegood_, and when she's writing _Loony Lovegood_ into her hand, and when the name _Loony Lovegood_ is bouncing around in her head, and any other time she feels like she's falling apart inside, which is all the time.

_My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood. My name is Loony Lovegood._

* * *

**P**rops to my beta-reader, the ineffably amazing TuesdayNovember.


	5. December

_**s**__e nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357..._

**T**hanks to everyone who reviewed. If I haven't gotten around to replying to your review yet, I will soon.

* * *

**FRIENDS**

**December**

* * *

Luna always spends the holidays at home with her father, whom she loves very much. Together, they always decorate a Christmas tree, and drink hot cocoa, and listen to songs on the Wireless. This year, she's both reluctant and anxious to go, since leaving Hogwarts means leaving Ginevra and all the potential friends she could have – but also Anders and Rebecca and the pink toad lady.

She tries to relax a bit on the train home. It's the first time since September began that she doesn't have to worry about Anders hexing her from behind, since Anders isn't going home for the holidays. No one bothers her, for once. Still, the whole trip feels gloomy from the start, and the snowstorm whiting out the sun doesn't help, either. There is no Ginevra on the train, no one to talk to - no one at all except Lonely Luna Lovegood. Luna sits by herself in a compartment and spends most of the trip staring at a page of the _Quibbler_ - an article about something or other, written by someone or other.

For some reason, Luna feels as if her brain is working a little bit faster than it should lately. She has more energy than she can use in one day; her thoughts sometimes get tripped up by each other because she has so many of them; she feels wide awake and fidgets a bit as she gets off the train, despite having slept for about total of, _maybe_, an hour the night before. This feeling persists even after her father Side-Along-Apparates her to their home, even after she's dragged her trunk up to her room and used it to block the door so she can cry in solitude while making _FRIENDS_ paper chains, even when she's staring up at the far-too-white ceiling that night while wearing her neon-purple pyjamas, trying to sleep.

When her father asks her what she would like for Christmas, Luna says she would like a new pair of shoes, because the giant squid ate her old ones. Privately, she also she asks that if there happens to be some higher being or other controlling fate (and such things of that nature), could they please give her a friend for Christmas? She would be ever so grateful if they did that. She really would.

For her father, whom she loves very much, she digs very deep into her imagination, and also into her father's research, and tries to draw a picture of what she thinks a Crumple-Horned Snorkack might look like, so he can have something to compare when he finally catches one. It takes her quite a bit of time and effort - and a wastepaper basket filled with balled up, scrapped drawings, because Luna keeps drawing things that are too mean-looking, or unhappy-looking, and it upsets her that she can't stop doing it, because the Crumple-Horned Snorkack is most certainly _not_ mean or unhappy! And eventually, because of her frustration overflowing again and bringing her to tears, she also has to push her trunk in front of the door for a while so she can sit on it and make _FRIENDS_ paper chains by herself.

She spends a lot of her evening time gazing up at her very blank and very empty white ceiling over the next few days (which turn to weeks, eventually) because she can't seem to wind down as easily as she used to when it's time for her to go to sleep. When she does sleep, it's often for just a few hours at a time, and then she wakes up and can't back to sleep for the rest of the night no matter what she does. What sleep she does get is pervaded by increasingly strange dreams.

Luna often dreamed, and still dreams, of herself, drifting through Hogwarts. She has friends, and there are people who care about her, and they make sure she knows it, and no one ever calls her _Loony Lovegood_ or steals her shoes and throws them in the lake where the giant squid eats them or sets the raven knocker at the common room entrance to lock her out all the time by giving her gibberish riddles or makes her carve _My name is Loony Lovegood_ into the back of her hand until she feels like she's disgusting and rotten and so _horrid_ and so _wrong_ inside. But sometimes, now, her dream-Hogwarts is replaced with a vacuous parallel otherworld; an empty nothing though which she floats; lonely, starless, and lifeless. It isn't so much a place or an idea as a state of being - or a state of nonbeing, rather. And it's so very _cold..._ Whenever she has this dream, Luna ends up waking to find herself staring at the blank white of her ceiling (which she wishes were some other colour, she thinks one night), unable to sleep again until the next night comes.

During past holidays, she used to go out and play in the snow and in the woods and try to see if she could learn to speak animal languages and go ice skating and make snow forts and run around and pretend to be a Muggle airplane and search for Frozen Forpestulators and go sledding and make snow angels and sometimes she would just sit on her roof and watch the sun go down but now she has no reason to do any of those things because she doesn't have any friends (such as Ginevra who was her friend but isn't anymore because well just because) and none of those things are any fun at all if there's no one to share them with.

To pass the time she's awake when she should be (or wishes she was) playing outside, having hot cocoa with her father (whom she loves very much), eating, sleeping, which is really adding up to a lot of time indeed, Luna makes _FRIENDS _paper chains and writes a letter to Ginevra. One letter. She tries to keep it short - but because her brain is working just a little too fast for her mind to keep up with, she keeps writing and writing and can't seem to hit the point of what she wants to say, because she has too many ideas and can't spend enough time on any of them, and soon she's writing a rambling, never-ending stream-of-consciousness dissertation on nothing that vacillates between being pleading, apologetic, accusatory, irrelevant, and, at increasingly frequent times, just completely incomprehensible.

_you always told me the way to make friends was to be myself Ginevra I am being myself I always am myself I don't think I could be anybody else very easily so I am being myself but nobody wants to by my friend why don't they want to be my friends I just want to have friends I'm going to die if I don't have any friends I hate my life if I don't have any friends what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong _

_when I am myself nobody knows who I am but I know who I am I'm Luna Lovegood __not__ L_**_xx_**_ny Lovegood because Mummy loved me very much she knew I am __Luna __Lovegood__ and not L_**_xx_**_ny Lovegood I live as Luna Lovegood and I AM just like everyone else but I don't know if I'm the same as everyone else they're all not like me and I'm the same as them but I don't know if I'm like them why aren't I like them I think about it when I'm watching the sunset sometimes even though I haven't watched it this year and oh Ginevra it's beautiful I wish we were still friends so we could watch it together this year, it's so beautiful and I'm so lonely and I wish I had a friend and I don't want to be alone and I hate being alone..._

_why did you call me L_**_xx_**_ny Lovegood on the train why did you let the pink toad woman make me cry in front of everyone why are you letting me hurt like this why are you hurting me what am I doing wrong why can't you see how much this hurts why did you call me L_**_xx_**_ny Lovegood why did you call me L_**_xx_**_ny Lovegood why did you call me L_**_xx_**_ny Lovegood why did you call me L_**_xx_**_ny Lovegood why why why why why why why why why why why why why_

When Luna isn't writing or drawing her father's Snorkack picture or making _FRIENDS _paper chains, she lies on her bed and stares at the blank white ceiling and thinks about how if she had friends, she would paint their faces up there in very perfect lifelike detail, with the same detail she used to draw Ginevra's face in September before her housemates burnt her drawing to ash and made her cry for the second time that year. She imagines how wonderfully comforting it would be to have her friends looking down on her as she sleeps, watching over her, reminding her that they love her, and how she would use her very special, very pretty gold pen to write the word _Friends_ around each face like a chain linking them together, so that each and every person who ever came into her room would know that they were _friends forever_, and _none_ of them would ever call her _Loony Lovegood_, and she would never have to cry in another bathroom again or wish she could sink into the floor when she was called on in class or ever ever ever ever ever feel lonely again...

Luna would paint Ginevra's face on the ceiling right now, if only Ginevra were still her friend. But she isn't. They're not friends anymore. Luna has no friends. And she's so very lonely. The only person on earth who still talks to her civilly is her father.

On Christmas day (for which she does not have to awaken early, as she did not sleep much at all the night before) her father gives her the pair of shoes she asked for, and it reminds her of how much she loves him, because she does love him so dearly. After a lot of hard work, Luna eventually managed to produce a decent drawing of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack, which she gives to her father, who is overjoyed at this and hugs her, and she almost cries into his shoulder for absolutely no reason at all other than that it's the first gesture of affection anyone has shown to her since he hugged her when he saw her off on the first of September. Then he happens to ask her how she's been faring at school, which he hasn't had a chance to do because he tends to forget things very easily ever since his wife's death (and Luna has been holed up in her room most of the time since she came home, anyway).

School has been excellent, Luna replies with a watery smile. She has learned many new things- which is the point of going to school, after all. There has been a recent infestation of Wrackspurts around the castle, but luckily she has managed to avoid getting one in her ear. She thinks Anders might secretly be an Umgubular Slashkilter.

Also, she blurts out, she's lost the only friend she ever had and she's been crying in bathrooms every day and she's terrified of going to most of her classes and she's been cutting _'My name is Loony Lovegood'_ into the back of her right hand as punishment for things she can't help and she has no friends and she's unbearably lonely and she's started to hate going to Hogwarts at all and doesn't want to do it anymore because they all call her _Loony Lovegood_ and steal her things to feed them to the giant squid and burn her drawings and lock her out of the Ravenclaw common room and she doesn't want to go back she wants to go somewhere else and she wants to make friends somewhere else and oh why can't she have a friend all she wants is a friend...

Her father stares at her with a rather dazed and shellshocked look on his face - the one he wears whenever something is too distressing for him to handle - the one that he wore for weeks after Luna's mummy died, when he kept forgetting she was dead because maybe he didn't want to remember and Luna had to keep reminding him of it because _she_ couldn't forget even though she wished (and still wishes) she could. It's a long time before he speaks, and when he does, he sounds more distant, more confused, more helpless, than she's ever heard him since then.

"I'll... give you a... a charm to ward off the Umgubular Slashkilter, then... shall I...?" he says. "Should help... Should make things... better... Must be the Wrackspurts causing... everything else... yes... I'll give you some material on Wrackspurt removal... It's very important to get them out of your classmates' brains... as soon as possible... Things should return to... to normal once the Wrackspurts are gone... Everything should be fine... when they're gone... Yes... Thank you for the Snorkack drawing, Luna-Flower... I should go update my research... Thank you..."

He wanders away, barely paying attention to what's ahead of him, nearly tripping over a chair in his dissociated stupor.

"You're welcome," Luna says after he's gone, pasting her big, fake, plastic smile on her face and feeling lonelier than ever.

* * *

_http:/ /www. youtube .com/ watch?v= gEtxrn7169U_

_Yttligare Ett Steg Närmare Total Jävla Utfrysning... Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock._

It is impossible to overstate how completely badass and awesome my beta-reader, TuesdayNovember, is.


	6. January

_**s**e nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357..._

**W**e're halfway through the year. Joy.

* * *

**FRIENDS**

**January**

* * *

The end of December marked the end of... something, though Luna isn't sure what it is. But she knows she misses it terribly and wants it back. January heralds the beginning of something else; again, Luna isn't sure what, but she knows it's not a nice something else. She doesn't like it at all. When she gets back on the Hogwarts Express and returns to school, she doesn't read _The Quibbler_ at all. Instead, she sits in her seat and stares out the window, fidgeting and tapping her foot on the floor, from the time the train leaves Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters to the time it pulls into Hogsmeade station.

What started as a little bit of trouble sleeping and focusing during her winter holidays gradually gets worse and worse. Luna hasn't been sleeping too well at all, and it's showing: her skin has grown even paler than its natural colour, which is quite pale indeed; there are ever-growing dark circles under her eyes, which are bloodshot and red-rimmed (and not just from crying anymore). She barely gets two or three hours of sleep a night. Instead, she's made hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pretty gold _FRIENDS_ paper chains. She's started skipping entire classes just to sit and make more _FRIENDS _paper chains in her dorm. Anders keeps burning them all up when she's not looking and Luna has to replace them or something very, very bad will happen. She doesn't know what.

In class, when she does go, she's a wreck. She sits in the back of the room and scribbles _Friends_ on scraps of parchment paper she finds in the trash (because between all her classes, the holidays, and Anders destroying some of her textbooks, she has nothing else to write on), and usually taps her foot nonstop the entire time she's in the room. She fidgets, she contorts herself up in very strange ways, she even pulls strands of her hair out sometimes, because she just can't _sit still_ _–_ even though it feels like she has to wade through an ocean of mud to think at all, like someone's cut the top of her head off and poured a lot of tar inside before putting the top back on again. When the pink toad lady calls on her to answer questions in Defense Against the Dark Arts class now, it takes a long, long moment for her to even process the questions, then more time to find the answers, and then even more time to switch back to the real world, and then still more to remember how to open her mouth and make noises, and by then the pink toad lady is already giving Luna another detention for ignoring her.

Luna dutifully attends all her detentions, of course. The hours and hours spent in the pink toad lady's office start to blur into a kind of greyish temporal goo whose only features are the jagged red letters of the words she keeps writing on parchment paper (there are enough of her lines to make a book with now, she thinks _–_ with some effort because it's like someone cut off the top of her head and poured tar in and put the top back on) with the very sharp red-inked quill that hurts her a lot.

It's all so hypnotic that Luna fears she may fall asleep during one of the detentions _–_ though she never actually does, because her brain won't turn off, and she just _can't_ sleep during a detention anyway, because that's very bad, and the pink toad lady says (in response to her yawning all the time even though her eyes are opened far wider than usual) if Luna goes to sleep in the office, she'll get her fingers crushed with magic to wake her up, and we don't want to have to do that now, do we, Miss Lovegood?

No, no, we don't, Professor.

Dinner is the only meal she actually attends, and she doesn't really eat very much then, because she's never hungry anymore _–_ her mind isn't, at least, because she just can't think about food when she could be thinking about _friends_. Her body is always hungry now, though, because she never eats, and goes through every day with almost nothing except the occasional Not-Gumball jawbreaker to sustain her. It's not really very important (not in the way it seems to be to the other girls, anyway), but Luna starts thinking after a while that she might be getting a bit thinner, since her clothes feel bigger than they did in September, and that's sort of illogical because Luna is a teenager, and teenagers are supposed to grow, not shrink.

Near the end of the month, Luna receives a letter from her father. Its arrival makes her shake with fear and relief, because she knows what it means. He's pulling her out of Hogwarts _–_ he _has_ to be. Luna doesn't know if it's because of what she said to him during winter break, or if it's because of what just happened with Sirius Black (who Luna now understands is _not_ Stubby Boardman of the Hobgoblins) helping those Death Eaters escape from Azkaban, or something else totally unrelated, but she doesn't _want_ to leave, and she wants to leave _so badly_, and it's all so confusing and overwhelming that she almost bursts into tears right there in the hallway where her father's post owl found her.

For once, though, Luna manages to hold herself together till she can find an empty classroom and lock herself in it. Then, when she opens the letter, unfolds it, and begins reading it, she does more than cry _–_ she sobs. Laughs hysterically. Screams.

_'Luna-flower!',_ it reads,_ 'It is with great delight that I inform you of the most probable location of the fabled and elusive Crumple-Horned Snorkack... it is said to be a well-hidden cave about four miles outside of Halmstad, Sweden! We shall journey there this summer, of course. I hope you are as excited by this news as I am, for the lead is quite a credible one indeed. I hope you are well; we must both be in good health and spirits for this adventure, which will surely be demanding at times..._'

The letter itself is four pages long, but Luna doesn't get past the first paragraph before she takes out her wand and lights it on fire, unconsciously arranging her face into her now-automatic fake plastic smile _–_ though it's trembling at the corners and her eyes are leaking tears. She lets it burn, watching the words disappear into the blaze, until the fire scorches her hand as well. Then she proceeds to scream herself hoarse and throw herself against the walls and hit the stones until she can barely speak and her head hurts and her hands are bleeding and her clothes are torn...

In the end, she huddles in the corner of the empty classroom and just cries softly.

Once upon a time, she enjoyed communicating with her father and talking about their creatures _–_ the Nargles, the Wrackspurts, the Umgubular Slashkilters _–_ but after all that's happened, after all the crying in bathrooms and the cutting _My name is Loony Lovegood_ into her hand with the red-inked quill and the having no friends and the feeling like a complete failure for months and the wanting so very badly to leave Hogwarts yet not wanting to leave at all because then she would _never_ _ever _have any friends would she... The magic is gone. Luna doesn't look for Nargles in the mistletoe or tell people she thinks they have Wrackspurts in their brains or anything of that nature anymore because the magic of believing is all _gone_.

Something's changed, and it's _awful._

But, Luna reminds herself days later, as she sits in the freezing cold with the Thestrals (who are quite friendly to her when she brings them things to eat), all of those things would be all right if she had friends to help her put herself back together. The only obstacle in her way is the fact that no one seems to _want_ to be her friend. _Still._

"Why doesn't anyone want to be my friend?" she begs of the nearest Thestral. "Do I not get to _have_ friends?"

The Thestral snorts at Luna, who desperately takes it as a no because she always tries to be optimistic wherever and whenever possible, and also she simply can't imagine a world without friendship.

"I wish Mummy were here... She would know what I ought to do..." Luna tosses the last of the raw meat she brought with her to the Thestral, which catches before it hits the ground. "I suppose I wish a lot of things that aren't possible, though..."

She stares at the distant castle, blinking to try to clear her dizzy, fatigued, slightly blurred vision. Ginevra is somewhere inside Hogwarts with her new friends (who are all much prettier and smarter and more likable than Luna is. Luna is very glad Ginevra is happy, even if she herself is lonely and miserable and sad and friendless now).

"...We were very good friends, though, you know," Luna tells the Thestral wistfully when she turns back. "We used to do all sorts of nice friend things together. We used to walk together in the forest and talk about things, and she would never laugh at me for anything I said, and it was ever so wonderful, and oh I would just give _anything_ to have a friend again..."

Before she knows it, she's crying, and also laughing a little, for some reason she can't really understand. Try as she might, Luna can't find anything humorous about the situation at all.

"Ginevra said she'd never call me _L..._ She'd never... s... never call me _that name_... Why did she do it? We were friends... Friends aren't supposed to _do that_... break promises... like that... It hurts..."

The Thestral trots over to her and nuzzles her a little. Luna presses her face into its mane and sobs. Eventually, she ends up clinging to the Thestral's neck, crying, unable to voice any of the things she's feeling because her mind won't slow down long enough for her to form a coherent sentence.

"I wish you were people," she finally blurts out. "You could come to the... the castle... be my friends... I could have friends... be wonderful... amazing... I wish... oh... I wish so much..."

For what seems like hours, she hugs the winged reptilian horse and cries and wishes Thestrals could talk to her and say _Luna I'll be your friend don't cry_ but they don't because they're just Thestrals and nothing more and unfortunately she can't pretend otherwise anymore because the magic is all gone and she can't get it back because she has no friends to help her. And then, eventually, one by one, the Thestrals leave, even the one that came to comfort her _–_ because even though they look like skeletons, they're still alive, and they're cold-blooded reptiles and can't stay out in the freezing cold winter snow for too long.

And then Luna is all alone again.

* * *

**N**ot-Gumballs are something from an earlier, scrapped story I started. They're multicoloured jawbreakers you can talk around without sounding like you have candy in your mouth.

_**P**raise my beta-reader, TuesdayNovember. Just do it, man. Don't question the voice of god._


	7. February

**_s_**_e nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357..._

* * *

**FRIENDS**

**February**

* * *

Luna is so tired she can barely remember which way to go for her classes anymore. She's been wearing the same clothes for days at a time; her hair is greasy and unwashed; her eyes are always wide-open; she looks quite mad to everyone, even herself. A few of her professors have commented on her unsightly appearance and taken points for it, telling her she needs to learn to groom herself better. But no one actually pays any real attention to the changes in Luna's behavior because, well, she's Loony Lovegood, after all. She was always strange and weird and dirty and disgusting and crazy and insane, and there's really just nothing to be done about it, and everyone knows it.

Secretly, Luna wishes someone _would_ pay attention. She's so very afraid...

Strange things are going on. She's starting to see things moving in the corners of her eyes; things that vanish when she turns to look at them. There are little noises coming from nowhere, too. Dripping... tapping... slithering noises. When Luna lies on her bed in the dormitory, shadows move around on the other side of the hangings, dripping and tapping and slithering – but when she flings the hanging aside and lights up her wand with the _Lumos_ spell and wakes up the whole dormitory so they can yell at her and call her a stupid Loony retard, there's nothing out of the ordinary to be found anywhere.

It isn't Anders, either. It happens even when Anders gets hexed and goes to the hospital wing for three days.

The lights are far too bright during the day, painfully bright, and at night the darkness seems to roll and undulate like there's something huge hiding just beneath it, pushing against it. Someone is whispering in her ears, but when she looks around there's no one there. It's a strange noise, a very strange noise; Luna doesn't like it at all... It's like a very quiet but sharp breath out: 'Ha_-h..._' And when she looks desperately for the source, there isn't anything.

Dreams continue to pervade the little sleep Luna does get. Awful dreams. Once upon a time, her dreams went like this: she drifts around Hogwarts, and everyone smiles at her and says _hello Luna, how are you today?_ because they're all her friends and they all love her so very much, and everyone (_everyone!_) likes her, and nobody ever calls her _Loony Lovegood_ or makes her cut _Loony Lovegood_ into the back of her hand and she has so many friends and her life is absolutely perfect... But now she dreams in vivid colour: of the sharp screams, and the rising flames, and the pointed pieces of broken bones that stick out of the broken body's arms and the legs, and the smell of blood boiling and flesh cooking, and most of all, touching her mother's beautiful red hair for the last time and realizing all she's touching is a pile of glowing red ash and then she's on fire and screaming too and everything isn't hot it's cold it's so cold why is it so cold –

And then she always wakes up with a scream and Rebecca yells at her to shut up.

Luna understands now that there's something very wrong. She _needs_ someone she can tell about all this. But of course, she can't, because she has no friends to tell, and so she sits on her bed instead and makes gold paper chains that say _FRIENDS_ and keeps an eye out for Anders.

Strangely, when Luna happens to glance in the mirror while changing her clothes day, she realizes she doesn't really look like a 'Luna Lovegood' anymore. It's odd, isn't it? That one could fail to recognize oneself in a mirror... After that, she begins to wonder if she's even still Luna Lovegood. Luna Lovegood would never do half the things she does. Luna Lovegood was always a free spirit, wasn't she? But now she hides, and cries, and hurts, and cowers, and mumbles, and wishes she would just dry up and disappear. Is that still who Luna Lovegood is, or is she someone else entirely?

When her hands aren't occupied making _FRIENDS _paper chains and writing _Friends_ in her textbooks with her pretty gold pen that's almost out of ink and warding off attacks from Anders (who isn't her friend) and wiping tears out of her eyes (because she has no friends), at least one of them is almost always holding onto her Butterbeer cork necklace. Luna doesn't remember how long she's been doing that, but the need to hold onto it is becoming more and more frequent as time passes. A horrid feeling is slowly growing within her that if she doesn't have something of hers to remind herself who she is, she could very well stop being Luna Lovegood and start being _Loony Lovegood._

And she's most _certainly_ Luna Lovegood, and not _Loony Lovegood!_ Because her mother would never call her that awful name – _Loony Lovegood! _Her mother loved her!

...didn't she?

Everyone else has someone who loves them. Luna watches the people around her and realizes she envies them so terribly. Her father's love is compulsive and empty, and her mother is dead, blown to bits, cooked, charred, barbequed, burned alive, and Ginevra called her _Loony Lovegood _on the Hogwarts Express in September, and no one else has ever done anything that even remotely hints at feelings of affection toward her.

There's a girl called Cho Chang that Luna watches sometimes in the common room when she's not making _FRIENDS_ paper chains or following Ginevra or crying or writing _My name is Loony Lovegood _or hiding from the scary noises that live in her walls and under her bed. Secretly, she wishes every so often that she could live Cho Chang's life. Cho has so many friends, and all of them are so happy around each other, and she's dating Harry Potter, and she's never had a detention with the pink toad lady in her life, and she doesn't have slithery tappy things living in her wall, and she doesn't sit and cry in bathrooms (well, sometimes she does, when she wants to get sympathy from other people... but if Luna lived Cho Chang's life, she wouldn't want any of that sympathy at all, because her life would be so _perfect_ already that she wouldn't _need_ anything more), and she has friends, and she has friends, and she has _friends_, and she has so very many friends, and _she has so many friends,_ and Luna wishes she had as many friends as Cho Chang.

"Why do you keep staring at me?" Cho asks her one night in the Ravenclaw common room, when Luna is sitting in a chair by herself wearing clothes she put on three days ago and gazing off into space with glazed eyes. Luna, who hasn't spoken directly to another person in longer than she's been wearing her clothes, flounders for a moment before answering.

"I-I'm ju-just – I mean, I'm jus – I-I'm trying to fig-figure out – how, how y-you make so many f-f-friends!" she squeaks pathetically. Cho smiles sweetly at her. Luna almost thinks maybe she might actually take pity on poor Lonely Loony _(NO NO NO)_ Luna Lovegood and tell her the secret of how to make friends.

"Don't bother," says Cho smoothly, and Luna wants to cry at how flawless the older girl sounds in comparison to her. "You'll never have any friends anyway."

And she goes back to her _friends_ on the other side of the room to talk about Harry Potter.

One night, near the end of February, Luna comes across that one girl who's made her life worse than all the others put together, Allison Anders, alone in a classroom. Anders has been missing all evening, which is unusual for her because she usually likes to be loud and obnoxious at the Ravenclaw table whenever she can. Luna wonders if maybe Anders got a detention for doing something bad – even her fast-talking hasn't been quite enough to get her out of trouble with Filch and the pink toad lady this year.

In any case, Luna is locked out of the common room by the raven head knocker again, and so she wanders around until she finds an empty, unlocked classroom she can sleep in, assuming Filch doesn't catch her and bring her to the pink toad lady, who will give her more detentions. She's been doing this a lot lately – sleeping in classrooms, and also getting caught by Filch, and also serving detention with the pink toad lady, but she was already doing that before. The only problem with this is that tonight, there's already someone inside the classroom.

Anders is hiding under a desk, wide-eyed and white-faced. She's shaking, disheveled, and if the tear tracks and redness around her eyes are any indication, she's been crying. A lot. Luna tentatively approaches her, because she tries to be as nice and helpful to everybody as she can. When she gets closer, she sees Anders's glasses lying on the floor near her shoe; Anders isn't wearing them because they don't have any glass in them anymore.

"A-Anders?" she asks, kneeling down and hoping very much that Anders doesn't set her on fire. "What's th'm – what's the matter? Are you... hurt...?"

Anders turns her head slowly toward Luna, though she stares right through her. When she speaks, her voice is much higher than usual.

"I don't know," the smaller girl replies detachedly, confusedly. "I don't know, I don't know what I think... I... I don't remember what I'm supposed to think... I don't _know..._" She starts crying again – sobbing. "I want my mummy... I want my mummy... I'm _scared_... I want my _mummy_..._ please_..."

Luna hesitantly places a hand on Anders's shoulder. Anders looks down at it, her eyes widening further, ballooning with psychotic rage, and then she very suddenly snaps back and recoils from Luna with such violence that she overturns the desk she was hiding under.

"Get your fucking hands off me, you fucking freak!" she screams. "Don't touch me! I'll kill you! Don't fucking touch me!"

"I'm sorry!" Luna cries, backing away as quickly as she can. "I just wanted to hel–"

"Get out!" Anders shrieks in a voice so loud and shrill Luna thinks it has to have done permanent damage to her vocal cords. She points something at Luna with a trembling hand – it's her wand, but it's been broken in half, the top part hanging by a string of red. "I'll kill you, I swear I will! I'll kill you, Loony! Get out! Get out or I'll kill you!"

By the time Luna makes it out of the classroom and the door slams behind her, Anders's threats have been reduced to incoherent screams. Luna doesn't understand what she did to deserve her fury, if anything, but whatever it was, it must have been terrible.

She doesn't even see Anders for a long time after that. Not in class, not in the halls, not in the dormitory – not until Anders comes to dinner a few days later, cowering instead of posturing, and eats quietly and quickly instead of competing to be the loudest, most obnoxious person in the Great Hall like she used to. Luna hears someone crying in the Ravenclaw girls' dormitory later that night, and she thinks – knows, really – it's Anders. She wonders why Anders would have to cry about whatever happened by herself. Anders has a lot of friends she could go to for help.

But then, no one bothers to comfort her when she cries, as far as Luna can tell. Rebecca tells her to shut up, and the rest ignore her.

So maybe Anders doesn't have as many friends as Luna thought.

* * *

**E**ven the worst of us are still human. Anders is a Dutch word meaning 'alternative'; I don't actually expect anyone to guess the symbolic significance of that on their own, since it's very obscure, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

_**T**his chapter was beta-read by TuesdayNovember, to whom you should give your thanks and respect for making it awesome._


	8. March

**_s_**_e nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357..._

**I**'m very sorry about the repeated changing of the update date on my profile. I can't guarantee that it won't happen again (I do a lot of things besides writing), but I'll try to avoid it in the future.

* * *

**FRIENDS**

**March**

* * *

Luna gets less than a night's worth of sleep every week. She dreads sleeping now – because if she goes to sleep, she has horrible, horrible nightmares about horrible, horrible monsters that do horrible, horrible things to her. Great fiery creatures made of ash that burn wildly and chase her through her dreams (which are now filled with endless bridges made from her mother's splintered bones that cross over abysmal black chasms). In the end, the monsters always catch Luna and devour her, no matter how quickly she runs, or how loudly she screams, or how much she cries, or how pathetically she pleads for them to stop hurting her.

Every night, she sits on her bed and cries while she makes her _FRIENDS _paper chains, which help ward off things hiding in the places she can't see, instead of sleeping. It isn't that she cries because she's particularly sad; she already cries enough because of that. No, she sits on her bed every night, all night, and cries because she's so very _lonely _and so very _afraid _and she doesn't know what to do.

It's not much better when she's awake, either: the dripping won't go away; the slithering won't go away; there are faces in the walls sometimes now – tortured, agonized impressions like someone behind the wall is trying desperately to break through and escape into the real world. Something is under Luna's bed – she can hear it moving at night, and she can feel it breathing, and she can smell its rancid odor. It follows Luna around, whispering that _hah_ noise and other things she can't make out into her ear. She's afraid to sleep with the curtains drawn now (despite the likelihood of her getting hexed by her dorm mates for existing), because if she does the slithering, tapping, dripping, breathing, whispering creatures are going to kill her. They're going to kill her and eat her body. They're all going to kill her and burn her and torture her. Each time Luna looks in the mirror, or indeed anything reflective enough to count as one, she expects to see not her own face reflected back at her, but some horrid, unnameable creature, leering at her, mimicking her actions, giving her only enough time to realize she can't escape before it lunges through to pull her into whatever hell it lives in.

Between her classes, during which she wears her fake plastic smile, she wanders around the freezing stone halls of Hogwarts, barefoot again (because someone took the new shoes that her father got her for Christmas and she doesn't even know what happened to them this time), eyes unfocused, following Ginevra Weasley, mumbling to herself about things like friendship and tapping and blood and Loony Lovegood and Ginevra Weasley and dripping and slithering and why can't I make friends and My name is Loony Lovegood and please why can't I just have a friend and oh god I wish I had a friend... And then sometimes when Luna has to leave her (former) friend Ginevra, because they've arrived at a class they don't share, she walks around by herself and talks to the air instead, pretending it's Ginevra, and it talks back to her and tells her what a wonderful, wonderful friend she is for _never_ giving up on her and Ginevra's friendship, and that makes Luna feel just a little bit better about her miserable, miserable life.

But only just a little.

On a slightly brighter note, Anders has stopped setting Luna's _FRIENDS_ paper chains on fire. She's stopped hexing Luna, too. In fact, she's stopped doing just about everything that makes her Anders and not an Inferius, save for breathing and crying. Luna hasn't seen her much at breakfast, or at lunch, or at dinner, or indeed at all, and when she does show up for classes, she just sort of ignores everyone and does her work in silence. Somehow, this just makes everything even worse – maybe, Luna thinks, she's just so used to the nasty, belligerent Anders that the subdued, meek version feels as wrong as everything else going on in her life.

But not to worry; there are plenty of other girls picking up where Anders left off. Some of them lock Luna in one of the dormitory bathrooms for several hours, and she panics and spends the entire time hiding in a corner of the room with her hands over her face, because she _knows_ that if she looks at the mirror, her reflection will come out of it and eat her like the monsters in her dreams, and everyone will forget about her, and she will _never_ have any friends ever again...

The pink toad lady thinks Luna's doing something with Harry Potter that's against the rules. She says someone (she won't say who, exactly) told her Luna is part of a group Harry Potter started that's plotting to overthrow the Ministry of Magic, and Luna had better tell her all about it or she'll be in a lot of trouble. Luna tells the truth and says that no, she isn't doing something with Harry Potter that's against the rules, like plotting to overthrow the Ministry of Magic. Being part of a tight-knit revolutionary group made up of her peers, she patiently explains, would be a bit like having friends, and she doesn't have any friends or anything close to them.

The pink toad lady smiles with her pointy little needle teeth and gives Luna more detentions for lying to her, even though Luna told her the truth. She says she'll keep assigning more detentions until Luna tells her the truth.

Which Luna already did.

From that day forward, Luna spends every single evening, from the time she leaves the Great Hall after dinner until the time she gets into her bed and cries all night, carving _My name is Loony Lovegood_ into her right hand while the pink toad lady watches her. Before the month is halfway through, she starts serving detention in the daytime, too. Luna spends more time in detention now than she does in class, and during every detention, the pink toad lady finds a reason to give her more detentions, so she'll come back again and cut _My name is Loony Lovegood_ into her hand again and again and again the next day, and the next day, and the next day.

More detentions. More lines. More pain. More humiliation. More blood. More. More. More. More.

_My name is Loony Lovegood. _

_My name is Loony Lovegood. _

_My name is Loony Lovegood._

There's so much blood now. Pages and pages of bloody lines that say _My name is Loony Lovegood_, and there's _so much blood_. There's more and more of it every night. The smell of it is invading Luna's dreams; she can smell blood every time she nods off, and sometimes she smells it during the day, too, when she's awake – when she's in class, she smells blood, and she doesn't know why.

There's so much blood. There's _so much blood_. Luna is drowning in an ocean of blood.

Her own blood.

There are so many detentions now – so many that it quickly becomes difficult to follow Ginevra between classes, and still the pink toad lady assigns more because Luna can't come up with the correct answers to her questions about Harry Potter. But she keeps telling Luna to tell the truth, and Luna is telling the truth, and even if she wasn't being told to tell the truth, Luna _still_ wouldn't lie and make up something to stop the detentions, because it's wrong to lie. Luna's mother taught her that. It's very, very, very wrong to lie, and Luna won't do it, for any reason at all. Rowena Ravenclaw sort-of agreed with that when Luna asked her about it, too.

One of Luna's new hobbies is staring at the bust of Rowena Ravenclaw near the door in the common room. This is much less uncomfortable than staring at herself in the mirror and waiting for her reflection to eat her because the Rowena Ravenclaw bust isn't going to eat her. Luna talks to the Rowena Ravenclaw bust as well – it's as good as anything else to talk about her problems to, since she doesn't have any friends to do that with.

"...and I still can't figure out who's talking to me... If I had a friend I could stand back-to-back with her (or him) and the next time I heard the noise, my friend would be able to see them since they're always behind me..."

She even gesticulates when she talks to the Rowena Ravenclaw bust.

"Sometimes I think that the whole world is right and maybe I am Loony Lovg... Loony Lovegood. Isn't that... isn't that... Hmm. My name is Loony Lovegood... My name is Loony Lovegood... Ohhh... I can't be Loony Lovegood... I have to be _Luna_ Lovegood... but... I don't know, I don't know... why does it say My name is Loony Lovegood...?"

Each time the word _Loony_ falls from her lips she feels like retching. She is _Luna_ Lovegood, NOT _Loony Lovegood!_ But something inside her keeps telling her: if it's important enough that she must write it hundreds and hundreds of times each day, in her own blood, on the back of her own hand, forever, then she ought to practice saying it out loud as well, just to be sure she doesn't forget it.

Rowena Ravenclaw agrees. Luna fidgets anxiously.

"My name is Loony Lovegood... My name is Loony Loveg... No it's n-not, no it's not, what... But it says my name is Loony Lovegood... But I'm _Luna _Lovegood..."

Maybe, Luna thinks, the whole world is wrong and right at the same time. Maybe it's better if everything is foggy and obscured and we don't know anything. It hurts less that way, most certainly... but then again one can't possibly think that way forever, or one would never have any friends. Friendship is right. Friendship is _always_ right...

"Friendship is always right," she confirms out loud to the Rowena Ravenclaw bust, which agrees with her again. "If I had some friends, everything would be all better, b-because friendship is always ri–"

"What in Morgana's name are you doing?"

The exclamation comes from Marietta Edgecombe, one of Cho's friends. Luna attempts to give her an explanation, but can't because she doesn't want to admit she's talking to an inanimate object because she's so lonely because she has no friends, because explaining that would be humiliating because everyone else has friends and she doesn't because she's Luna Lovegood and everyone else isn't Luna Lovegood.

"I don't know," she finally says in a vacant, toneless voice.

Apparently it was a rhetorical question, because Marietta gets even more irritated when Luna answers it. "Of _course_ you don't know _anything!_ There's _nothing_ going on in your head, Loony! You're a fucking embarrassment to Ravenclaw house, that's what you are!"

"I sup... I suppose... I am..." Luna mumbles.

"She doesn't even deny it," another of Cho's friends, Mandy Brocklehurst, cries, sounding astonished and even a little bit outraged. "Did you hear that? She didn't even deny it!"

"In the Muggle world," says Rebecca Tanneth, "there's a term for people like Loony, you know."

"What is it?"

_"Mentally retarded,"_ Rebecca replies, very slowly, very loudly, and very deliberately, looking at Luna instead of at her friends while she speaks.

A few of the other girls snicker. Luna bites her quivering lip and stares intently at the Rowena Ravenclaw bust, trying her very best to block out the taunts (truths?) and also the growing buzzing sound in her head, and _also_ how nauseous and ill she feels. The walls of the common room start to bend and distort oddly in the corners of her eyes. It looks like they're made of rubber, and they're waving back and forth, but when she actually looks at them straight on, they're just walls. _Weird walls._ She can almost hear them laughing at her. That's not normal, is it...? Walls aren't meant to laugh at people. Even if those people have no friends and get called _Loony Lovegood_ and believe in unusual things and look rather odd. No,_ other _people are meant to laugh at _those _people...

"It's funny how she talks to that statue like it's her friend, or something," says Cho Chang suddenly. "I think the real Rowena Ravenclaw would have run her out of Hogwarts a long time ago if she were still alive."

"They didn't tolerate brain-damaged retards in the olden days," Rebecca agrees solemnly, though still loudly enough that Luna can hear her. "That means_ you_, Loony. You should never have been in Ravenclaw to begin with."

Later that night, while sitting up and making _FRIENDS_ paper chains and listening to the slithering, tapping, dripping things and the ha_-h_ noises and the faint screaming behind her wall and the buzzing in her head and Anders crying and the other girls telling her to shut up and let them sleep, Luna decides Rebecca and her friends are right – she should never been Sorted into Ravenclaw, because she isn't much of one at all.

She isn't very rational at all, is she? If she were, she would have figured out how to have friends by now. She's not very interested in learning, is she? If she were interested in learning, she'd be doing her homework and going to class instead of crying in bathrooms and making _FRIENDS_ paper chains. She isn't very clever or witty, is she? If she were clever and witty, she would know what to say when people talk to her and when she's called on in class and when the pink toad lady wants answers about Harry Potter.

When she considers it, Luna doesn't think she'd fit into any of the other houses, either – she's not very brave (or else she wouldn't freeze up and want to sink into the floor every time someone speaks to her), or cunning (or else she would have been able to find a way out of her endless detentions a long time ago), or hard-working (or else her grades wouldn't be as terribly low as they are now).

No, Luna decides, she isn't any of those things. She's actually just kind of useless and dumb, isn't she?

Secretly, in the very back of her irrational, dumb, stupid, brain-damaged, retarded mind, Luna sort of wishes somebody actually would run her out of Hogwarts like Cho said. Maybe then she would be able to go someplace where she could make friends like herself. Maybe, she thinks, there's a place for people like her, and she just got sent to the wrong school by accident. Maybe if someone ran her out of Hogwarts, she could find a place with some other brain-damaged retards like her if she looked very hard. And then she would have some people like herself to be friends with.

Wouldn't that be wonderful?

* * *

_**P**raise my beta-reader, TuesdayNovember. Praise her. Praise her. Praise her. Obey. Obey. Obey._


	9. April

_**s**e nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357  
**o**ch jag tror du vet..._

**T**wo months left after this one. What do you think of the cover art? I have no artistic talent/am lazy, so I went for something minimalistic. We're all just spots in the dark, anyway.

* * *

**April**

* * *

Struggling to please the people around her has replaced Luna's schooling almost completely now. The professors have all but given up trying to make her participate in class because she doesn't listen to anything they say, and they have better things to do than talk endlessly at a psychotic retard, don't they? So instead of doing her schoolwork, Luna makes a desperate (absolutely pathetic) effort to make someone, somewhere, happy enough that they'll be her friend.

Even if it means she has to sacrifice all her own happiness and every shred of dignity she has left.

Cho Chang and her friends seem to understand this very, very well. The worst part is that Luna can't help but fall into their traps, even when she _knows _deep down that they're traps – because she's just so desperate to believe one of them might someday be her friend that she can't resist going along with whatever they tell her.

They've discovered that if they say things like, "Make my bed for me and I might talk to you again tomorrow," or "Do my homework, Psychowhore! Maybe I'll be your friend if you write a good essay!" or "You should wash your hair! Nobody'll want to be friends with you if your hair is that _greasy!"_ Luna will do anything they want her to without hesitation.

Of course, they always have her make their beds right before they go to sleep in them, defeating the purpose; and all the homework Luna tries to do for them is two years above her own so she doesn't even understand most of what she's supposed to be writing about and can't risk looking it up because she might fall asleep if she tries to read (and besides, they already wrote their essays...); and the time they get her to agree to let them wash her hair, they trap her in a bathroom and won't let her out until she washes it in the toilet. After that last incident, Luna stops crying in bathrooms and starts crying in empty classrooms instead.

She wishes Anders would come back and torment her instead of spending her time hiding in the dormitories and crying and being very un-Anders-like. Anders never pretended to be Luna's friend or anything horribly confusing like that. Anders liked to hex her, but Luna thinks getting hexed is a bit better than getting called what Cho and her friends call her when they're not pretending to be nice to her, which is always some variant of 'whore'. They don't insult her at every possible opportunity the way Anders did, though; no, they talk to her like she's a human being, a real person, until Luna almost feels safe, and then they pull the floor out from under her and leave her even more uncertain than before.

And then, one evening at dinner, Cho Chang tells her she and the other girls will (grudgingly) let Luna tag along with their group (not quite as a friend, but maybe someday...) if –

"–and only if, you go to the Gryffindor table and pass out Muggle condoms to every boy there."

Luna stares at her, trying to understand. She supposes the combination of her being retarded, not eating, and not sleeping makes it harder, because she just can't understand.

"I didn't have to do that when Ginevra was my friend," she says in an almost-whisper.

Cho gives her that horribly perfect smile again – the one that makes Luna feel as if she's unworthy of existing near the older girl. "Ginny was just pretending because she felt bad for you. You're going to have to do _different_ things to make _real_ friends because you're a retarded whore and no one likes you."

"Oh."

The revelation that Luna never had any friends at all (not even Ginevra...) makes it far easier for her to do what Cho and her friends want her to. Maybe, Luna thinks as she heads toward the Gryffindor table in a daze, step by step, with Rebecca's box of condoms in her hands, it just hurts so much she can't feel any other kind of hurt anymore. Somehow, Luna finds it easier to accept what Cho tells her than to try to fight it. Cho might be her friend someday if Luna follows the rules (she's learning...) and that's what's important.

Besides, Cho is smarter than she is anyway.

It's not so bad at first. Luna is used to people calling her crazy and stupid and retarded and Loony, and it doesn't really bother her all that much anymore (because maybe they're right so she should stop getting upset about it and just accept it?). She's used to feeling humiliated and very small and wanting to sink into the floor. But she's not at all used to some of the disgusting things the Gryffindor boys are saying to her now, and she's not used to the looks they're giving her. The yucky, rubbery things leave an oily film on her hands, and she can't wipe it away because she doesn't want it on her clothing; the knowledge of how low she's sunk clings to her in the same way.

The slithering and the tapping and the moaning and the distant screaming get louder with each one she gives away. Someone, or something, starts mumbling endlessly from behind an invisible veil, saying things Luna can't understand, but they never take a breath and it begins to scare her, and she herself begins to shake. The sound of a mistuned violin seems to play in her ears, amplified with a booming, screeching Sonorus Charm.

Eventually, Professor McGonagall leaves the Head Table to see what the commotion is about. Luna panics and just leaves the Great Hall, even though she knows she hasn't finished doing what Cho and her friends want her to do, because the thought of more detentions terrifies her and anyway she just can't stand the sound and the tension any longer. The noise follows her into the hallway, up the stairs, through corridors. The walls begin to swell and undulate bizarrely as she passes them. There are footsteps behind her, eyes upon her, making her squirm; the slithering and tapping and incoherent babbling from nowhere are nearly drowning out her thoughts.

Luna finds an empty classroom and locks herself in it. Sitting in the mostly darkened room – the lights, now, just don't seem to be enough to illuminate the whole room properly – in the very center, nearly mesmerized by the sight of the walls bulging and rippling with whatever's moving around behind them, and takes some of her pretty gold paper out of her bag so she can make her _FRIENDS_ paper chains, because doing that always calms her down (if only a little bit). She's done it so many times now that she can do it perfectly without even looking.

Something is growing more and more tense, and it's going to snap soon, and it's going to hurt so very terribly. In the far distance, there's laughter, and sobbing, and chatter, and all manner of noises, and the screams of Luna's mother as she dies, and footsteps, and the word _Alohamora_ and the sound of the door opening –

It's a boy with short, light brown hair and green eyes who makes Luna's stomach flip-flop involuntarily because he's very handsome. Then she starts when the door shuts behind him – softly, but it seems to generate an enormous _bang_, and the walls swell to ever-greater proportions.

"Hello," the boy says to her. "You're Luna Lovegood, aren't you?"

Luna nods, her eyes darting nervously around the room before she focuses on him again. "Yes, that's me," she replies, smiling her stupid, retarded, fake smile at him. "You're Cormac McLaggen."

"Yes." Cormac takes a few steps in her direction. "You're not very popular."

"No," she agrees sadly, nodding her head again, "I'm not."

"You don't have many friends."

She nods yet again, feeling tears prickle at the corners of her eyes at the reminder of her seemingly endless failure. "No, I don't."

There's something very wrong with Cormac McLaggen, she realizes as the walls swell yet again. His face shows the half-smirk most people express when talking to Luna these days, but his eyes are shining with a kind of ghoulish excitement she's never seen before.

"I can do whatever I want to you, and no one will care."

"W-what?" Luna stops working on her half-finished _FRIENDS_ paper chain. "What does that-What does that mean?" she squeaks.

"Oh, come on," scoffs Cormac. He leers at her. "You figure it out."

"I'm not-I'm not-I'm not a whore! I'm not!" Luna protests, dropping the _FRIENDS _paper chain altogether because her hands are shaking so badly all of a sudden she can't even hold it, and the reason her hands are shaking so badly all of a sudden is that she's just realized what Cormac means by '_whatever I want'._

"'Course you aren't," the sixth year snickers, advancing toward her.

"Please don't..." is the only resistance Luna puts up to his assault. She waits in the middle of the room on her knees, crying, because the walls are screaming so loudly at her that she's paralyzed and can't even think, and her brain is broken and there's blood dripping down everywhere and things are crawling out of the cracks between the stones and all the desks are laughing at her and the chairs are calling her Loony Lovegood and the door says she's going to be a real whore now and the ceiling says it wants a turn with her next and _OH GOD SHUT UP WHY WON'T YOU ALL PLEASE JUST SHUT UP!_

It's violent and brutal, and it _hurts_. In every way imaginable.

Luna has never really been a particularly sexual person, so when she occasionally imagined what it would be like to have sex for the first time, it was always something sweet and romantic and beautiful, like an extension to the ending of a fairy tale. Not... _this._ Half-naked on the stone floor with Cormac McLaggen's hand choking her so badly she's afraid she might pass out and not wake up, having her head bashed against the floor every thirty seconds, listening to the stream of filth he's spouting from his mouth-the most oft-repeated two words in which are _'Loony'_ and _'whore'_.

And then it happens: the wall bursts open and its contents spill out in a great heaping orgy of blind, slithering worms and half-transparent three-legged spiders that look like moving water and human cockroaches and quivering gelatinous blobs of bloody flesh without features and a thousand other awful things. When Luna sees what she now shares her world with, she screams. And screams. And screams. And screams.

"What's wrong, Loony?" Cormac laughs. "You finally lose your mind completely there?"

"Please – oh god, _stop!"_ Luna sobs when she's able to speak coherently again, and when Cormac isn't cutting off her air supply. "Please, please, please, please, please, please, stop! I want to die! I want to die! Please just kill me! I want to die now – just _stop!"_

"Funny thing," says Cormac, grinning at her, "Anders said about the same when I fucked her. It took her a lot longer than you, though."

An hour and a half later, Cormac finally finishes violating Luna and walks out of the classroom without saying another word to her, laughing like the whole thing is some big, hilarious prank he's just pulled off. Luna puts the clothes he took off her back on and fixes the rips with her wand – Cormac didn't even bother taking it from her – and then she curls up in a tight ball on the floor and cries among the monsters that came out of the wall and the dripping blood and the laughing desks and the chairs that call her Loony Lovegood and the door that says she's a real whore now and the ceiling that says it's going to fuck her next.

"I can't do this anymore," she whispers to no one in particular.

Early the next morning – very early – Luna limps down to the gargoyle that guards the Headmaster's office, having decided, finally, that she's going to ask if (maybe) she can, (if it's not too much trouble) leave and go somewhere else because she's really just not meant for Hogwarts, after all, is she... But when she reaches the stone gargoyle at the entrance, there's already someone there: the pink toad lady is in front of the gargoyle with her wand out, shouting at it and trying to make it move aside for her. Luna's stomach turns over nauseatingly as the two beady little eyes fall on her, and she instinctively jams her mutilated right hand in her pocket to hide the hideous words cut into it.

"And what are you doing here, my dear?" the pink toad lady enquires with feigned, very forced sweetness.

"Was just... going t'see..." Luna mumbles, looking intently at the one of the stones on the floor.

"Speak up, girl. No one will ever be able to understand you if you mumble all the time."

"I need to see P-Professor Dumbledore..." says Luna. She's shaking now, beginning to regret her decision to go up and talk to the Headmaster, and everything hurts and maybe she should have taken a shower instead because she still feels so disgusting after everything that happened the night before and being stared at like she is now makes it even worse –

The pink toad lady smiles, showing her pointy little needle teeth. "Professor Dumbledore is now wanted by the Ministry of Magic for the crime of sedition, and has fled the establishment. What_ever_ would you _possibly_ need to see him for, my dear?"

Luna mouths silently for a moment, unsure what she's supposed to say and not wanting to admit the truth.

"Well?" The question is more forceful this time, and what little resistance Luna had crumbles.

"I want... I want to drop out of... s-school..." she whispers.

She spent the entire trip up to the Headmaster's Office contemplating how she would word her request, but the answer comes out all wrong when she says it because she's not talking to the kindly, gentle, grandfatherly Professor Dumbledore, she's talking to the cruel, sadistic pink toad lady who likes to watch her cut herself up every evening like Muggles enjoy watching television from their sofas, and anyway she's a retarded whore so of course it was going to come out wrong, and why did she ever think otherwise?

"Well," says the pink toad lady after a moment's silence, "as the new Headmistress of Hogwarts, I can tell you that most certainly won't be happening. Whatever would possess you to want to leave Hogwarts, Miss Lovegood? Now that the Headmaster is gone, the Ministry will surely ensure the very highest standards of learning; you should be thankful for your good fortune in being enrolled here. Detention, by the way – for your behavior last night. In fact, I think you deserve detention for the rest of the year."

Still smiling, she bustles past Luna, in the direction of her office, seemingly cheered enough by the encounter to forget that the gargoyle at the door won't move for her.

Luna just stares at nothing for what seems like ages. Something seems to bubble up from within her and bursts out in a torrent through her mouth. But it isn't the sound of crying; it's laughter.

Terrified, hysterical, desperate laughter.

* * *

**T**here was originally a rape warning at the top, but I took it out because 1) the rape isn't graphic, just emotionally traumatizing; 2) the warning detracted immensely from the impact of the story; and 3) Friends is supposed to be upsetting, not 'safe'." You should feel awful after reading this, not just sad. If anybody has a serious problem with (which I doubt will happen), PM me and we'll talk about it._  
_

_**M**any thanks to my beloved beta-reader, TuesdayNovember, who helped me figure out how to rearrange the last four chapters of Friends in a far more dramatic way._


	10. May

_**s**__e nu hur alla dina minnen formas till en magnum 357  
Och jag tror du vet någonstans där innerst inne..._

Sorry about the wait between updates. Real life took precedence.

* * *

**May**

* * *

The expression of dull shock on Anders's face when Luna limps into their dormitory for the first time a week after Cormac attacked her (Luna spent that week hiding from everyone, especially Cormac – in broom cupboards, in bathrooms, and in a room that appeared out of nowhere) suggests she knows exactly what happened at the end of April. Luna watches her struggle, like she can't figure out if she wants to say something or not, but in the end Anders doesn't have to decide because Rebecca Tanneth tells her to shut up before she can even open her mouth.

"I heard you're a_ professional_ whore now, Loony," Rebecca says later that night, when they're all in bed and Luna is staring blankly at the ceiling (not making her _FRIENDS_ paper chains anymore) and Anders is crying behind her curtains. She snickers when Luna flinches.

"I know some boys who'd _love_ to fuck you like Cormac fucked you," she adds in a faux-seductive voice. "Interested?"

"No," Luna mumbles. "Please don't talk to me anymore."

"Suit yourself, whore."

The feeling of shame Luna experienced when handing out condoms at the Gryffindor table is nothing compared to the way she feels every moment after that night. It's an awful, awful feeling – she's so filthy and dirty and yet she can't even stand the thought of putting her own hands on her body to wash herself.

Someone changed the lock on her trunk during the week she spent away from the tower, and she can't get to her other clothes. Somehow, it doesn't matter; one should always show one's feelings, and Luna feels more disgusting and wretched than she ever has in her life. Even when she finally opens her trunk again, she just stares at the hundreds of _FRIENDS_ paper chains inside for a long time and then leaves without changing.

Her week-old clothes are more than appropriate for her now, she thinks sadly.

Luna thinks once or twice or ten thousand times about telling Ginevra what happened to her, but never does. Even if she could get close to her ex-pseudo-friend, which she can't because Ginevra has people looking out for her now, she's sure Ginevra would say something that would hurt terribly, because after all they never _really_ were friends, were they, and so Ginevra never really meant any of the promises she made about not hurting Luna, did she... A couple of times, she also wonders if, maybe, Anders would talk to her if she asked, because they're both very unhappy and no one seems to like Anders very much anymore either. But Anders seems too ashamed to even look at Luna after the first time she returned, and Luna doesn't really know what she'd say to Anders if they did talk, anyway.

Each day, Luna walks and walks and walks around, and each night, Luna walks and walks and walks around some more. She doesn't even know when she's tired anymore because she's tired _all the time_, even after she sleeps for almost an entire day in a broom cupboard.

Beady little eyes stare at her from the walls when she wanders through the hallways. Sometimes, her schoolmates' heads explode for no reason, and when Luna screams in terror, they look at her and say _what are you doing, Loony?_ because all of a sudden they have heads again and there's no blood or brains to be seen splattered everywhere like there were (plural) just moments before. Strange things follow her through the corridors – weird, skeletal, Thestral-like things; but instead of smelling like the forest, as the Thestrals do, they reek of burnt flesh and shit, and whenever Luna sees them she experiences a terrible feeling of dread and has to run from them. If she looks for too long at one spot, no matter where, it begins to bend and distort, like it's melting away, and she starts to get very nauseous and has to stop looking before she throws up.

Sometimes, Luna's schoolmates talk to her now, about things like friendship and Ginevra Weasley and Cormac McLaggen and the tears Anders cries and burning death and pain and everyone hates you and you're a whore and die and no one will ever miss you and other such topics. It's a novel experience because Luna hasn't talked to anyone so much in ages, but somehow it's so very unpleasant because there's just something so _off_ about it all. They only come and talk to her when she's alone, nauseous, dizzy, and confused – and they tend to look very strange and squiggly like bad drawings. They also tend to not know what she's referring to when she tries to talk to them later, and tell her they never talked to her, which makes Luna cry more because it's so _confusing_ and it _scares_ her that she's talking to people who don't remember talking to her later on and she's so _afraid_ and everything's so _sad_ and she can't _sleep_ and she feels _disgusting_ and _dirty_ and _ruined_ and _bad_ and _wrong_ and nothing makes sense anymore at _all!_

In fact, the only things left in Luna's rancid mess of a life that she can count on to remain consistent are her endless detentions with the pink toad lady, which she clings to like a life preserver. She giggles hysterically while writing her lines now, as tears roll down her cheeks, grinning her ever-more retarded fake grin. Spending so much time cutting her hand to pieces has finally started to take its toll on her body as well as everything else: Luna can't close her fist all the way anymore, and it hurts just to move her fingers. The wounds in her skin are inflamed and disgusting; they don't stop bleeding for hours and hours after she leaves detention; the flesh around that area is spotted with hundreds of tiny red dots which she's sure are from an infection of some sort.

No one seems to miss her at all, in her endless wanderings. Every so often Luna passes her classrooms – where she should be learning with _friends_, where she should be with her _friends_, and she knows everyone else is inside, and she's not – and everyone seems to have given up on making her join them by now because they've realized it just won't work. They don't want to be her friends because she just isn't like them, because she's stupid and weird and retarded and a whore and a thousand other things that are so _wrong wrong wrong_.

Oh, if only she were just a little bit more _right_ instead of all wrong... If only she weren't so terribly _her_...

If only, if only, if only.

Of course, Luna is truly beginning to doubt that even a kind, caring friend would be able to help her anymore. It's terrifying to think about – but perhaps she's just beyond help. Still, she thinks, it would be ever so nice to have a friend to hold her and let her cry into their shoulder and make her feel a little bit better about everything, even if it wouldn't stop the horror... But none of Luna's friends can help her, because she has no friends. She can't cry into their shoulders because there are no shoulders to cry into. They can't tell her it will be all right because there are no mouths with which they might speak. They can't wipe her tears away because there are no hands they can do it with.

Maybe she really just doesn't get to have friends, she thinks as she sits in the girls' bathroom in the Charms wing, crying – and also giggling uncontrollably, because she does that a lot now. Perhaps she's in hell. There are no friends in hell, are there? Maybe she doesn't deserve friends because she's just so horrible her mother killed herself to get away from her. Maybe her mother _knew_ how insane she was and named her Loony Lovegood becau_NO NO NO NO MY NAME IS–_

_MY NAME IS–_

_MY–_

_NAME–_

_IS–_

_..._

With growing horror, Luna realizes she can't remember anymore if her name is Luna Lovegood or Loony Lovegood.

And then all of a sudden, Cho is there to help her remember. Cho, except it's not Cho – it's more of a Squiggle-Cho, like a very bad drawing (Luna made a drawing of Ginevra in _I-can't-remember-when-anymore_, and it was a very _good_ drawing and not squiggly at all, but then her housemates burnt it to cinders and it's all gone – everything's all gone). Squiggle-Cho _hmm_s for a moment, and then she reaches out and takes hold of Luna's right wrist so she can examine her hand.

"Oh," she exclaims in a bright voice, "it says it right here. _'My name is __**Loony Lovegood'**__._ Your name is Loony." She twists Luna's arm a bit to show her the writing on the back of her hand.

But – no. That can't be right. She can't be Loony Lovegood. That can't be her name. She knows it's not. It can't be. She doesn't want it to be. Her mother wouldn't call her that awful, horrible name – would she?

"It says it right on your hand, Loony," Squiggle-Cho tells her earnestly.

"But – Mummy wouldn't! She _loved me!_" Luna yells, her voice echoing around the bathroom. "Mummy loved me... Please... My name can't be Loony Lovegood... It can't be... It just can't be..."

"But it's right on your hand. It's probably there in case you forget _–_ you know, because you're retarded, and all," says Squiggle-Cho. She pats Luna on the shoulder. "It's not your fault you're dumber than everyone else, Loony. Don't cry."

Luna just trembles and shivers and cries harder.

How could her name be Loony Lovegood? How could her mother be so cruel as to give her _that_ name? That name for someone no one could ever, _ever_ like... Unless she deserved it... Unless she really is Loony Lovegood.

Suddenly, it all begins to make sense.

She has been impersonating Luna Lovegood. No wonder she doesn't have any friends – she should never have existed. Luna is just her fake name. It's just what she _calls_ herself. She's really Loony Lovegood pretending to be Luna Lovegood. Yes – that's it. But now she knows who she really is, because she's stopped _lying_.

She's a whore named Loony Lovegood. No one will ever like her. Loony Lovegood will never have any friends.

Silence. A long, empty silence.

"Cho?" Loony rasps.

"Yes, Loony? What is it?" asks Squiggle-Cho.

"W-will you b-be my friend?"

"No," Squiggle-Cho replies immediately. Loony just nods resignedly.

"If – If – If I went away–" the younger girl mumbles after a long time, "–w-would anybody m-miss me?"

Squiggle-Cho ponders this question for a moment, then favors Loony with her sweetest smile, which is a smile worthy of the real Cho Chang.

"No, Loony," she says. "No one would ever miss you at all."

Sitting alone all by herself, which is really how it should be, Loony Lovegood cries like never before as she finally accepts that she'll never have a single friend – not even Ginevra, whom she's lost forever – no matter how badly she wishes for someone to come and save her. No one will ever comfort her; no one will ever tell her she's worth anything; no one will ever let her cry into their shoulder or dry her tears; no one will ever just hold her when she feels lost and alone...

Because she's Loony Lovegood, and Loony Lovegood doesn't get to have friends.

* * *

I wanted to have Cho be the one to tell her those things, but it's much more interesting if the person saying them is what Luna _thinks_ Cho is like, even if the real Cho (while extremely cruel to her) really wouldn't say something as terrible as that.

This chapter could have been better, but my beta and I have a lot going on, so you'll suffer for it. I'll probably come back and clean it up another time.


End file.
